By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

To Require Arab and Muslim Forces

In the weeks since the October 8 cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, establishing and maintaining security in Gaza has become a crucial test. Already in the days after the deal was announced, Hamas began a campaign of violent retribution against rival groups as it sought to reconsolidate control over areas Israel had vacated. On October 19, the killing of two Israel Defense Force soldiers in Rafah prompted Israeli airstrikes. And on October 28, the killing of another IDF soldier and Hamas’s continued delay in returning the bodies of hostages caused Israel to strike dozens of targets across Gaza, killing more than one hundred people and raising concerns that the deal itself might collapse. If Hamas is allowed to reassert its influence and Israel is forced to continue to intervene at this or even larger scale, the cease-fire may become yet another temporary interlude in an unending conflict.

The security challenge was anticipated in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, which specifically calls for the disarmament of Hamas and the deployment of an international stabilization force for Gaza. Yet the time required to carry out complex negotiations on the implementation of these goals has created a vacuum that will worsen the longer action is delayed or stalled. In one promising step, the United States opened the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a new CENTCOM-led headquarters, on October 17. Located about 15 miles east of Ashkelon, it will provide a headquarters for some 200 U.S. servicemembers who have been sent to support the cease-fire and could play a key role in overseeing the ISF. For legitimacy in Gaza, the stabilization force will need to be staffed by troops from Arab and Muslim countries, but strong U.S. leadership will be crucial. Alongside the CMCC, Washington must leverage other resources it has in the region, including the U.S. military’s work with Israeli and Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.

Only occasionally do geopolitical conditions create an opportunity for a fundamental reordering of regional alignments in ways that can lead to sustained peace and prosperity. In the Middle East, such a moment exists now. But it will take additional effort by all the participants in the Gaza negotiations, including the United States and its Arab and Muslim partners, to forge an actionable agreement. Failure to reach a quick accord on the ISF and the disarmament of Hamas is likely to doom long-term prospects for the cease-fire.

 

Unfinished Business

After two years of war, Hamas has been severely diminished. Its leadership, three rungs deep, has largely been killed, and the group lacks anything close to the capacity to threaten Israel that it had when it launched the October 7 attacks. Yet Hamas remains a force in Gaza: thousands of recruits have joined its ranks, and its violent campaign against rival clans and purported collaborators with Israel has left dozens dead. Even if the group’s remaining weapons inventory is limited, it clearly can disrupt desperately needed aid flows and, as it has already shown, including this week, its fighters can still attack IDF troops or a newly established international stabilization force.

Hamas will not give up its arms willingly. Its weapons are its path to retaining power, or at least dominant influence, in Gaza, and handing them over would contradict its ideological motivations. Unlike the Irish Republican Army, whose underlying goal was British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the establishment of a single, united Irish Republic, Hamas’s goal is not simply to get Israeli forces out of Gaza or to create a united Palestinian polity; it also seeks to eliminate the state of Israel. As chilling intercepts and a memo recovered from a Hamas computer have shown, former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered the group’s fighters to target as many Israeli civilians as they could and to destroy their homes. Such plans should lay to rest any doubt about the group’s ultimate intentions.

Preventing Hamas from having any official role in postwar governance will not solve the problem. Potentially, the only thing more dangerous than the group retaking formal control of Gaza would be for it to exert power without political responsibility. This is the model that Hezbollah has followed in Lebanon, with devastating results: as the country’s economic, physical, political, and security infrastructure continually eroded, Hezbollah blocked the parliament from functioning; obstructed investigations into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and the 2020 Beirut port explosion; undermined Lebanese efforts to work with the International Monetary Fund; built up an arsenal of missiles and weapons from Iran and attacked Israel, risking the safety of the entire Lebanese population; and created a parallel Hezbollah-dominated civil society infrastructure that gave it destabilizing public influence. And since it was not in control of the government, it could disclaim any responsibility for the country’s collapse.

If denied a formal role in Gaza, Hamas will try the same thing: exercising power and imposing its will over any governance structure that emerges. Not only would this complicate international efforts to rebuild Gaza; it could also create a dangerous new threat to Israel. Lacking significant armed opposition to compete with it, Hamas could reestablish its dominance through intimidation, money laundering, ruthless elimination of rivals, and terrorist threats.

 

The Disarmament Dilemma

There are only two realistic ways to prevent Hamas from reasserting its hold on power. Either Israel reenters the portions of Gaza from which it has withdrawn to confront Hamas, a strategy that would require yet more destruction and have uncertain chances of success. Or an international force moves into the territory, confronts Hamas, and slowly disarms the group through military means and other forms of pressure—a process that could take years. Both of these options present significant pitfalls.

Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-held and clearly stated condition that Hamas must disarm for the war to end, the final months of the conflict illustrated Israel’s inability to achieve this aim. Notwithstanding the enormous scale of destruction and displacement in Gaza, groups of Hamas fighters retained the capacity to attack. If Israel reverts to confronting Hamas militarily, then its realistic objective will have to be containing the group and minimizing the threat it poses. As senior current and former Israeli military and security leaders already argued during the months before the October 8 cease-fire, a strategy aimed at totally disarming Hamas will leave Israel stuck reoccupying Gaza while doing little to advance Israel’s long-term security. Moreover, such an approach would also slow the pace of humanitarian support and reconstruction to Gaza.

Instead of renewed war, Israel could adopt a counterterrorism approach, undertaking frequent raids against specific Hamas cells and leaders. In the West Bank, it has been using this approach for years, with some success, although it has often come on the back of security cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian forces. In Gaza, however, such an approach would be more difficult. Israel could seek to engage local clans as local stand-ins for Palestinian forces, but they would likely struggle to build the level of cooperation and support needed to enable a successful strategy based on counterterrorism raids alone.

The second option, for an international force to take the lead in disarming Hamas, carries challenges of its own. In the past, external, UN-sponsored deployments in the Middle East have been a disaster from Israel’s perspective. In Lebanon, UNIFIL—the UN’s peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon—did little more than watch Hezbollah amass an extensive weapons arsenal and build tunnels that could be used to threaten Israel. In the Golan Heights, the UN Disengagement Observer Force is probably best known for a 2014 confrontation with the al-Nusra front in which many of its forces simply fled into Israel. Nonetheless, other kinds of international missions have had more success and could serve as models. Established more than a quarter century ago, the NATO-led Kosovo Force, known as KFOR, continues to operate in the region today and has helped maintain peace and enhance stability in Kosovo. The international security mission set up in the Balkans by the Dayton peace accords in 1995 also remains in effect today, with the mission now under European Union forces.

Given Israel’s general distrust of international security missions, the new ISF for Gaza must be explicitly authorized and equipped to disarm Hamas—potentially by UN Security Council resolution. This requirement has already caused misgivings among leaders of some Arab and Muslim countries in the region—including Jordan’s King Abdullah II—who almost certainly fear the negative domestic public reaction that would come from their troops actively fighting Hamas. But they can’t have it both ways. If their priority is creating a political horizon for the Palestinian people, they will have to contribute real military force to ensure that Hamas is not part of the equation. Otherwise, Hamas will simply wait them out, rebuilding its power base and capabilities and eventually precipitating another war with Israel—regardless of whether it is one, two, or five years from now.

Eliminating Hamas’s military threat does not need to rely on force alone. Seeking to cajole Hamas fighters to disarm would have been impossible even six months into the conflict, given the extent of the group’s command and control before October 7. But Israel’s success in diminishing the group—even if at tremendous human cost—has opened up space for such a pathway. Younger, less ideologically committed recruits might be prepared to lay down their arms if it enhanced their own family’s physical and economic security. Such an approach has been shown to have some success in other situations. The Sunni Awakening during the Iraq civil war—when the United States paid and armed local groups in Anbar Province to renounce al-Qaeda—demonstrated that if realistic alternatives exist, local leaders and populations can be convinced to break from a dominant force, including a terrorist group.

Disarming Hamas will be extraordinarily difficult, but such a dual approach—enticing members to disarm on their own volition but making clear that international forces are willing to engage them kinetically if they do not—has the best chance of freeing Gaza from the group’s control. This can only happen, however, if the ISF is supplied by Arab and Muslim countries and includes a very long-term goal of transitioning to Palestinian forces. Arab and Muslim forces will have far greater legitimacy with the Gazan people than a Western force. The larger question is how the United States can best provide a strong hand in leading such a force.

 

Arab Agency, American Authority

As negotiations over the Gaza cease-fire continue to unfold, building regional support for the ISF will be critical. Arab and Muslim states have long been wary of participating in stabilization missions in Gaza, let alone operations that might involve the use of force. Thus far, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Indonesia have all indicated a willingness to commit troops to Gaza. But what specific missions they would be willing to carry out remains unclear. Before the cease-fire, the United Arab Emirates came closest to committing to take part in an undefined stabilization force but insisted that it would do so only if the force were led by the United States.

The Trump administration should view the UAE’s insistence that Washington be in charge as an opportunity rather than a burden. In outlining the ISF’s mission, Trump’s 20-point plan emphasized that a key function will be training Palestinian forces. This will certainly be a critical component. But given that the ISF will itself also need to play both a military and police role, a U.S.-led framework that leverages the participation of Arab and Muslim states will offer the best balance of legitimacy and operational effectiveness.

U.S. leadership is also needed to make the ISF credible to Israel. An Arab-Muslim force in Gaza that is largely autonomous is unlikely to offer Israel the reassurance it needs to avoid taking potentially destabilizing military action against every threat that emerges from Gaza. If instead the ISF is under strong U.S. leadership, it would mean that if Israel insists on engaging a high-value Hamas target, it will be compelled to coordinate with or at least inform the United States. The U.S. administration could then seek to convince Israel to let the ISF take action instead, or pressure Israel to keep any operation it undertakes as narrow as possible, reducing the potential for reigniting a broader conflict.

Trump has been clear that putting U.S. boots on the ground in war zones, especially in the Middle East, is a nonstarter. But the United States does not have to send its own troops into Gaza to wield control of military operations in the strip. To the contrary, Washington has a strong incentive to direct the ISF regardless of whether U.S. forces are involved, since failing to do so would run the risk that foreign troops might act in ways that do not align with broader U.S. security objectives. Of course, for the U.S. military, directing the ISF without its own forces on the ground in Gaza is not ideal. But the prospects for long-term Hamas disarmament, the reestablishment of Israeli security, and the prevention of renewed conflict will be far more remote if the United States does not assert this leadership.

To assert strong control over the ISF, the Trump administration should integrate the new CENTCOM-led CMCC with existing U.S. military efforts in the region. The administration’s decision to establish the CMCC signals its intent to play a leading role in the future of Gaza. But the center would be significantly strengthened by leveraging already existing critical resources, most prominently the U.S.-led Office of the Security Coordinator in Jerusalem. Since 2005, the OSC has worked to enhance security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority; advise the Palestinian Authority on security reform and institutional capacity building; and provide training and equipment to counterterrorism operations in the West Bank.

This past summer, as part of its State Department reorganization, the Trump administration moved the OSC under the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem instead of having it report directly to the Secretary of State, as it had previously. The administration would be wise not only to reverse this decision but also to extend the OSC mandate to Gaza. Trump should also order that for Gaza-related matters, the U.S. security coordinator concurrently report directly to both Secretary Rubio and CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper, who is also serving as the CMCC commander.

Substantively, since Cooper cannot be in Israel full time, the president should also give the U.S. security coordinator a dual hat as the CMCC commander, and appoint a one- or two-star U.S. or allied officer to serve under him as the ISF commander. Doing so would enable U.S. leadership of the mission while ensuring that the international forces on the ground in Gaza are Arab and Muslim. The responsibilities of the CMCC commander would include directing the U.S. service members who have been deployed to support the cease-fire and working with Ambassador Steven Fagin, the recently appointed civilian leader of the CMCC.

Such a U.S.-led structure for Gaza would provide four advantages. First, the OSC mission has well-established expertise and has earned the respect of Israeli and Palestinian forces alike. Second, 11 other NATO countries contribute to the OSC mission, and giving the OSC a strong role in Gaza would be an efficient way of ensuring both buy-in and burden-sharing among European allies in Gaza’s security and stabilization. Third, empowering the OSC in Gaza could also expedite additional training support by other allied missions, such as EUPOL COPPS, an EU mission that provides coordination and training for Palestinian law enforcement and criminal justice in the West Bank. Finally, this kind of U.S. joint leadership would help create the conditions for Palestinians themselves to eventually play the leading role in Gaza.

 

Gaza’s Long Game

Ultimately, the long-term goal of the Gaza plan is for a transformed Palestinian Authority and Palestinian security forces to assume responsibility for the territory. At present, such a transition may seem remote, given the extensive reforms that the Palestinian Authority needs to undertake. For such a shift to Palestinian leadership, the United States, its Arab partners in the ISF, and the board overseeing Gaza’s technocratic government, as well as Israel, will all have to be confident that the new PA forces have sufficient capacity to prevent interference by Hamas remnants and ensure Gaza’s security. Only by demonstrating the high standards of training and capacity, and the consistent ability to coordinate with civilian leaders, that the OSC demands of security forces in the West Bank will Palestinian forces in Gaza be able to gain credibility with all the parties.

World leaders should expect the ISF to remain in Gaza for years to come. Only an international force under strong U.S. leadership can provide the security needed for effective governance, the smooth flow of humanitarian aid, rapid reconstruction, and the assurance that any groups in the territory remain a minimal threat to Israel. But the mission should also be carried out to set the conditions for future success. To gain buy-in and commitment from Palestinians, the deal’s guarantors must make clear that the mission is laying the foundation for Palestinians to take over. For Trump’s cease-fire to withstand the growing pressures it faces, U.S., Arab, European, and other leaders will quickly need to agree on a unified approach for disarming Hamas and setting up the ISF. Any delay risks squandering this rare chance for long-term peace and stability.

 

 

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